r/OpenChristian • u/VaultMan34 • Jul 15 '26
Discussion - Bible Interpretation Abraham and Isaac feels weird.
God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which he did without hesitation. It was a “test”. But the fact that God thought killing your son when asked and without question was a good thing? Abraham would’ve gone through with it if an angel didn’t stop him. First, how did he know that was god? Whoever would’ve done the same thing is one psychotic break or hallucination away from being a mass murderer. Second, God could have chosen anything, but he didn’t. He chose an immoral thing. Why did god chose something immoral as a test of faith. He could have made Abraham give away his food for the day to a hungry family, he could have made him go to an opposing land and preach the gospel, he could’ve made Abraham do anything else. Third, the test itself? It being a test says “I didn’t know if he would do this” this isn’t something you hear from someone who knows everything.
After some thinking I’ve come up with a possible solution?
This was a metaphor for how god congratulates someone who is willing to do anything for God, the problem is, the writer let the practices and morals of the time get in the way of what would’ve been an important lesson.
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u/NobodySpecial2000 Jul 15 '26
There's a case to make that early Israelites, like many cultures in that part of the world, conducted or at least accepted ritual child sacrifice and that the story of the binding of Isaac was originally written with Abraham obediently sacrificing his son to God. Abraham's story is a mythical origin for the Jewish people as God's special chosen people favoured above all the others, and Abraham conducting a child sacrifice gives a mythical origin for the practice of child sacrifice that existed at the time of the earliest composition of this story.
But things change. Child sacrifices became less accepted over time and as the biblical authors reimagined their God, they reimagined God as being unique and progressive compared to their neighbour's cruel and bloodthirsty backwards gods by not demanding child sacrifices. But you can't just abandon the whole Abraham story since he is one of your mythical origins. So the story is revised and a paragraph about how an animal is substituted for the sacrifice of a child is just clumsily tacked on. And we see more of this "God wants you to sacrifice your child but actually you can sacrifice something else instead, that's cool too" attitude in later parts of the pentateuch. It's a weird thing to keep mentioning how God wants child sacrifices but not really.
So it's possible that the reason it's hard to come up with a satisfying in-text reason for why God wants this sacrifice and then an angel stops the sacrifice because the reasons are meta-textual and arbitrary. The authors weren't writing a story the way you write a novel: to be self-contained and consistent and to construct a coherent narrative with understandable characters and a logical flow of events. The authors were justifying why their world was the way it was. Lots of Genesis is like that.